They are colossal, they are ever hungry, they tear stars apart, not even light can escape their gravity. Black holes. What are they? How do they form? It’s hard to embrace the fact black holes exist, and sure, they’re absolutely impossible. Maybe astronomers see something that looks and behaves just like a black hole should, but at the same time, math shows that black holes can’t exist at all without breaking lots of nature’s laws.

Black holes don’t just swallow matter around them, they also consume all the information about every tiny particle they swallowed. In quantum physics, it’s impossible for the information to get simply deleted from reality, but that’s what black holes do. Despite the fact black holes slowly evaporate and so give away their mass and energy, they won’t return this information to the Universe, and this shouldn’t be possible.

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